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Electronic Arts showed off Battlefield 4, its new military shooter for PC, Xbox One, and PS4, at E3 earlier this week. Sitting in a theater drowning in bass, it was nothing short of staggering. There were dozens of soldiers, vehicles, artillery strikes and explosions. A soldier shot out a support beam and a tank crashed through the ceiling. A helicopter strafed a large office building until the metal groaned, buckled, and collapsed in on itself as the structure fell to the ground. Whatever we call "next-gen," this was clearly it: a technological marvel of a battleground floating on an ocean of code.

Seeing it, I couldn't help but think about the developers at DICE, slaving for hours into days on the physics running underneath that singular spectacle. I saw a lot of similar feats at E3 that week, mostly in the same old molds, but impressive nonetheless. The PS4 and Xbox One will bring us everything we expect: better graphics, more complex engines, more sprawling games, more detailed characters and new hardware. The only catch is that all of this will be very, very expensive, for the consumers, sure, but mostly for the developers. As excited as I am about what my favorite companies might do with that horsepower, I'm worried about what it will mean for the industry as a whole.

Game development costs have skyrocketed since Atari. Pixels don't choose their own color, and models don't make themselves. It requires some serious work to take advantage of each major technical upgrade and, in recent years, it has become clear that it's difficult for human teams to keep up with the exponential growth of computing power. I talked to Harold Ryan, the head of Bungie Studios, which made the industry shaking Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 with 42 people. Their new game, Destiny, has a team of 450. That inevitably means more eyes on a project, less creative freedom and more investor pressure.

The financial implications behind teams that big will continue to shape the way games get made. Ultimately, higher technical requirements will mean fewer, bigger games. They won't be able to afford to be as risky creatively, so we can expect a lot more of the same reliable genres. But they will themselves be even riskier, because of the massive investment required to make them. I expect to see a lot more stories like that of Curt Schilling's 38 studios, which sunk millions into a big, expensive game and then shuttered after it couldn't move the colossal number of copies it would have needed to make financial sense. I also expect to see more THQ's, which just couldn't make AAA game development work despite a handful of popular franchises. Game development gets more dangerous even as the games become safer.

And that doesn't even touch the bigger question -- will people still buy next-gen consoles? I don't worry about launch year, where demand will likely outstrip supply for a few months at least. I worry about whether or not either the Xbox One or the PS4 can achieve the cultural ubiquity and install bases of their predecessors in a world brimming with alternative entertainment options. Who wants the trouble? Core gamers will say there will always be an audience for new, immersive, gigantic games. I tend to agree, but I also wonder: just how big is that audience? And can it justify the amount of manpower these games take?

There are silver linings: 's commitment to the burgeoning indie games scene is one, the promise that Unreal Engine 4 will allow bigger games with smaller teams is another. But the industry is still largely working on the assumptions of the past even as the world changes inside and out. There's a tremendous amount of "excitement" for the new consoles, even if that might be amplified and recycled by forum-heavy and vocal fan bases. The graphics of these new games will mean that they will require bigger audiences than before. Vocal minorities cannot support next-gen development. Coming off of the excitement of E3, I wonder what's going to happen when all of these shiny new projects need to prove that they can make it to the black.